Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning (Paperback)

~ Steve Goldman (Author), Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts (Author)
Key Phrases: runs above replacement, strikeout rate, finesse pitchers, Red Sox, World Series, American League (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is the book about the 90% of the game that’s half mental. It’s the smartest analysis of a smart team yet written.”
— Allen Barra, The Wall Street Journal (Wall Street Journal )

This is the book about the 90% of the game thats half mental. Its the smartest analysis of a smart team yet written. Allen Barra, The Wall Street Journal (Wall Street Journal )

Product Description

Think You Know Baseball?
Think Again.

The Red Sox finally won a World Series, in a triumph of unconventional wisdom. They rethought the batting order and committed to Johnny Damon as lead-off. Saw the talent in David Ortiz that other teams overlooked. Had the courage to trade one of the game’s top shortstops for the good of the team. They knocked over the sacred cows of RBIs, sacrifice bunts, the hit-and-run, and hewed to the new thinking about pitch count—allowing Pedro Martinez, arguably baseball’s best pitcher ever, to excel. Weaving statistics, narrative, personalities, and anecdote, Mind Game reveals exactly how this group of “idiots,” led by Theo Epstein and Terry Francona, was in fact the smartest team in the league, and revolutionizes the thinking fan’s understanding of how baseball games are really won and lost.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company (September 19, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761140182
• ISBN-13: 978-0761140184
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #448,528 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable Read for Baseball Prospectus Fans, November 13, 2005

By	Victor Illonardo (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

Mind Game is not only a chronology of the 2004 World Championship season, but a careful review of how the Boston Red Sox were built. You don't need to be a Red Sox fan to enjoy this one. The book describes the trades and analysis employed by Boston's management team to build the winner: The Arod "almost" deal, Nomargate, and Curt Schillings' injury (the best chapter in the book).

Please be aware - the book is best suited for readers who are at least familiar with the work of the Baseball Prospectus staff. While the writers do explain their methodologies as susinctly as possible, if you pick up this book without knowing what VORP, EQA and PECOTA are - you are not going to like the book.

What Mind Game does best is expose myths: did the Red Sox really get hot after their on-field brawl with the Yankees? (No); did the Red Sox get hot after the Nomar deal (not right away); Does defense and pitching win championships? (read and find out)

As a bonus, the book has several terrific appendices including "the Complete List of Baseball Brawls", the best and worst trades by each Red Sox GM and Baseball Prospectus rankings of Red Sox players.

Most of the chapters are very well written, particularly those of Will Carrol, Steve Goldman, Nate Silver and Jay Jaffe. Despite the fact that about a dozen authors contributed to Mind Game, stylisticly it flows reasonably well. The only bumps in the road are the few chapters written by James Click which border on incomprehensible.

So if you do have sabermetrics leanings, this book is a wonderful and I strongly recommend it.

(I have no personal or professional affiliation with any of the writers, publisher, etc. of this book)

37 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All-Star Analysis, Replacement-Level Writing, October 7, 2005

By	RK (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

I eagerly anticipated this book, and was only slightly let down when it finally shipped.

On the positive side, it condenses into one volume all of the decisions that went into the making of a championship team. It's especially insightful because Baseball Prospectus has a similar understanding of the game as Sox' GM Theo Epstein. I also appreciated the fact that it's not a pure "stathead" book, and delves into things such as why it's sometimes sensible to overpay a player such as Jason Varitek, why (at the time) it made sense to sign Matt Clement in place of Pedro, and why team chemistry matters (it doesn't always help, but it rarely hurts.)

On the down side, it could have used a lot more proofreading and copy editing; there was at least one paragraph that I had to re-read three times before I could figure out who "him" was (Frank Crosetti). Maybe we need a new stat, "Typos Above Replcement Writer," or "Grammatic Efficiency Ratio."

Perhaps most annoyingly, it's full of glib political references that will alienate about 50% of readers. At the very least, they're distracting, sending the reader off into thoughts of, "Is that a dig at somebody? Is he right?" when you want to be thinking about baseball. These sorts of things are fine in a daily column, but they're inevitably comtemporaneous, and may be hopelessly obscure before the Sox win again. The book would have been much better had the author restrained himself. I don't understand why sportswriters do this, especially since Baseball Prospectus holds itself to much higher standards of accuracy than most political analysts.

But, if you want to read the real story behind the 2004 Red Sox, if you want to understand the thinking behind the most talented and progressive management in the game today, then this is the book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Daring premise, good execution, November 25, 2005

By	Diane B. Firstman "dianagramr" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Once again, the folks at Baseball Prospectus have tried to (re)examine the basic precepts of winning baseball. Once again, they have succeeded.

The naysaying reviewers criticizing everything from political jibes (I think I saw *2* in the whole book) to a supposedly *obvious* point (Rivera being solved by the Sox due to their familiarity with him) are being hypercritical. There are plenty of announcers out there (the likes of Joe Morgan and such) who would NEVER draw the conclusion on Rivera that BP has.

I *liked* the essay format, as a distinct change of pace from the "on April 15, they did this ... on April 21 they did that" tomes. The book DID have a flow to it, logically and chronologically. Analyses were sensibly connected to what the Sox were dealing with at the time ... injuries, brawls, offense vs. defense. The "stathead" stats were presented with a minimum of "even if you don't understand it ... just go along with it". There was a *logic* to the presentation.

The one thing I do have an issue with (and it has been said before) is some sloppy editing, particularly in latter chapters. Typos, disjointed sentences and factual errors made for some difficult reading at times. I know the final piece of the book was written in early August for an October release, but it still irks me a bit.

This is a daring attempt to present a recap of one team's season in a new format. I think we should be offering them congrats.